Material: The Art of Handcrafting Beautiful Objects in a Digital Age
This book is a fluid path from an idea, along a stream bed whose variations, detours and eddies are unknown until the water that flows into it finds itself moved.
Society
New consciousness: the brass ring
From a society-wide perspective, a new consciousness a involves major cultural change and a reorientation of what society values and prizes most highly.
Where Can We Live?
In the West, we would do well to consider places like Brazil in developing a strategy to start down the path to ending homelessness here and we would do well to consider the power of the 8 to 11 million unhoused people who know what they need and are finally beginning to organize for their future.
From Plato to AI: Are we losing our minds?
Each step in human evolution has brought inventions that threaten to weaken our innate abilities.
Political Collapse: Lessons From Fallen Empires
Our investigation of the disastrous society-wide collapses of four premodern polities, China’s Ming Dynasty, the South Asian Mughal Empire, the High Roman Empire, and Renaissance Venice led to the discovery of an unexpected historical pattern.
Can We Escape Modern Civilization? Human Nature Odyssey meets Crazy Town
In a farmhouse attic turned podcast studio in Corvallis, Oregon, I joined Crazy Town podcast hosts Jason Bradford, Rob Dietz, and Asher Miller to discuss whether it’s possible to escape our modern civilization and its various components (industrialism, imperialism, capitalism) or whether we’re completely trapped.
Ironic and Tragic: Technological Fundamentalism and Our Fear of Limits
It is ironic that technological fundamentalists believe we can do anything we set our minds to, except limit the voraciousness of the human enterprise. It will be tragic if this fundamentalism continues to determine our course and the scariest dystopian scenarios become our future.
Daniel Christian Wahl: “Bioregional Futures: Reconnecting to Place for Planetary Health”
This week, Nate is joined by Daniel Christian Wahl, a leader and activist in regenerative living, for an exploration into what our lifestyles and communities could look like if we aligned human systems—like agriculture, economy, and community planning—with the natural ecosystems of a specific bioregion to create more sustainable and harmonious ways of living.
Us vs. them: Understanding the roots of political polarization and what you can do about it
Richard Heinberg explores why societies become polarized and traces the causes and history of polarization in the U.S. He unpacks the dangers of polarization and the ways it tears societies apart, before seeing what can be done to reverse polarization.
Global trends are polarizing us: Can democracy handle it?
Richard Heinberg explores questions about democracy and political polarization in the context of profound changes in environmental, economic, and technological conditions, including whether democracies or autocracies are better able to respond to crises.
Othering and Political Conflict in the Great Unraveling
This live online event features Lilliana Mason, Associate Professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and author of Radical American Partisanship, and Cecilie Surasky, Director of Communications & Narrative at the Othering & Belonging Institute. Post Carbon Institute’s Asher Miller will join Lilliana and Cecilie for an expansive conversation on the drivers of polarization and othering, and methods for fostering belonging and mutuality.
Discussion: How to Overcome Polarization in Your Own Community
This live online discussion event features Trisha Dehrone, a PhD candidate and NSF Fellow at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Trisha has designed and analyzed interventions that bridge group differences in divided societies and has evaluated interventions in the U.S., Rwanda, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
